£500 Rice Cooker vs £30 Rice Cooker – Is the Upgrade Worth It?
This page is designed as a bit of extra context to go alongside the video above, rather than a full retelling of everything that happened. If you want to see the complete tests, reactions, timings and outcomes, that’s all covered properly in the video.
If you’d rather watch directly on YouTube, you can do so here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKwB9Gvs1m8
Below is a straightforward summary of the tests I ran and what I actually took away from them.
White Rice: Two Very Different Approaches
My usual £30 rice cooker is quick, simple and reliable, but it does have one quirk. If you leave the rice completely alone, as the instructions tell you to, the base can lightly catch. It’s not burnt, but it does pick up a bit of colour.
The KitchenAid rice cooker takes a very different approach. It weighs the rice for you, dispenses the water automatically and then cooks much more slowly than I expected. That longer cook time initially felt wrong, but the end result was extremely fluffy rice with no catching at all.
You don’t get to see what’s going on inside, which feels slightly odd, and for the price it was surprising not to get even a basic serving spoon. The rice itself, though, was excellent.
Lentils and Grain Settings
I tested red lentils next, without using the soak setting.
What I liked here was the ability to choose the final texture, as lentils can be unpredictable depending on brand and age. The results weren’t perfectly uniform, but overall they were well cooked and nicely handled.
The same applies to grains like quinoa and barley. Having preset options that don’t rely on you constantly checking water levels or timings felt genuinely useful rather than over-engineered.
Porridge: Where Things Fell Short
This was the one test that didn’t live up to expectations.
I prefer creamy porridge made with milk, and according to the manufacturer, the machine should allow for this. In practice, I couldn’t get that option to work at all, despite the software being fully up to date.
I ended up cooking the oats with water and stirring milk through once it switched to keep-warm. It worked, but it wasn’t especially creamy, and it wasn’t something my cheaper rice cooker couldn’t also manage with a bit of hands-on stirring.
At this price point, that felt like a missed opportunity.
Steaming, Brown Rice and Longer Cooks
I also tested the steamer basket with salmon and broccoli alongside brown rice. The steamer worked very well, as long as it was used before cooking the rice. Doing it the other way round would have caused the rice to absorb the steaming water and throw everything off.
Brown rice took a surprisingly long time compared to packet instructions, but the end result was spot on. Adding the steamer basket back in for the final part of the cook worked really nicely and felt like one of the stronger use cases for this machine.
So What’s the Takeaway?
The expensive rice cooker clearly does what it sets out to do. It produces excellent rice, removes a lot of guesswork and handles a wide range of grains very confidently. That said, it’s slower, more closed-off, and in some areas didn’t quite deliver on what it promises. I don’t think this is a must-have upgrade for everyone, and I’ll still happily use my cheaper cooker day to day.
But as a piece of kit, it was far more impressive than I expected, even if I’m still not entirely sure who it’s actually for.
More Rice Cooker Experiments
If you want to see just how far you can push a rice cooker, I’ve previously made a full English breakfast in one, which is still one of my favourite experiments:
https://barrylewis.net/recipe/full-english-breakfast-in-a-rice-cooker/